Grieving mom says pastor cited God to get money !!

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Cynthia Fleming buried her 23-year-old son, Marine Cpl. James T. Jenkins, in his dress uniform and all his medals on a rainy October afternoon in Ewing nearly two years ago. Mourners filed past the open casket. Women in black dresses wailed. Then Bishop Steven Parrott walked to the pulpit and looked into a grieving mother's eyes. In a sonorous baritone honed by decades of preaching, he told her: "Cynthia, be comforted, everyone in this room loves you." For months afterward, Parrott, a Newark pastor, called Fleming, a former Hamilton resident now living in Mount Holly. Parrott would lend a sympathetic ear as she talked about her fight to win death benefits for her son, a standout Nottingham High School wrestler and decorated Iraq veteran who suffered a breakdown after his second combat tour and ended up killing himself. Fleming vividly remembers when her relationship with the preacher began to change. It was March 15, 2006, the day she told Parrott she'd been awarded the insurance settlement. He called back a day later, she says, and told her God had begun speaking to him. God, he said, wanted him to borrow money. He was very specific about how much: $25,000. "The Lord told me to ask," she recalls him saying. "It's for my church." She wrote him a check the next day and two more checks over the next two months, $75,000 in all -- a hefty portion of the death benefit. Fleming was sure the preacher was good for it, they'd practically grown up together, neighbors on the border of Newark and East Orange, the son and daughter of preachers. In the weeks after asking for the loan, she said Parrott told her he had lined up a "multimillion grant" and could more than double her money by August 2006. It never happened. Now Fleming says she's lost hope she will ever see her money. http://blog.nj.com/timesupdates/2007/08/grieving_mom_says_pastor_cited.html What do You think about the Story ?